A jar used in ancient Egypt to contain entrails of an embalmed body.
I had never seen a columbarium until I found one at St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens. Having wandered the cemetery grounds I saw these buildings from a distance and somehow arrived at the assumption that these were monasteries or administrative buildings. Whatever they were I assumed they were inhabited, and my innate apprehension about exploring cemeteries forced me to stay well away from those structures.
Assuming these buildings were centers of activity it was with a sense of discovery and astonishment that I found they were anything but that.
The first of these buildings was a dual purpose community mausoleum and columbarium. The mausoleum portion of the structure is, I immediately surmised, a glorified morgue. The columbarium part of the building was a series of cabinets with niches, and each niche held one or more cremation urns. Some niches also contained framed photographs and other items. The urns contain the cremains of the deceased, and some of the urns were really quite wonderful to look at, bearing artwork and decorations unlike any I had seen on traditional outdoor tombstones.
I spent some time looking at each display case, finding that some of the deceased (or others on their behalf) had gone to some creative effort to make their niches stand out.
I arrived at one case which contained several items: a trophy, a photograph of a young man, and a baseball. There was also a piece of glass which contained an image of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center.
This young man, I realized, must have died at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
I looked deeper into the niche, looking for the cremation urn, but there was none. He was one of those whose remains went up in those ghastly pillars of smoke.
